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with Lancelot—" he began seriously.
    "She didn't fool around with Lancelot!" Sabrina cried, incensed. "It was a great chivalric love! All the knights were expected to honor and give service to a lady.
    Lancelot was the greatest knight in Arthur's kingdom. It was right that he should honor and serve the greatest lady of that kingdom!"
    "Who just happened to be Arthur's wife," Jake pointed out dryly. "The wife of his lord and his friend."
    "Well, that was the way chivalry worked," Sabrina tried to explain, "A knight was expected to love a lady from afar, and it didn't matter whether or not she was married. The important thing was that the desire to please her impelled him to do great deeds in her honor. It provided a knight with the overwhelming wish to better himself, to become a great hero, be the best possible sort of knight. Medieval knights always yearned to serve a lady, but the whole idea was to worship her from afar, to take inspiration from her—not to sleep with her!"
    "Lancelot," Jake stated incontrovertibly, "slept with Guenevere,"
    "Malory doesn't say that," Sabrina argued. "He says he doesn't claim to know whether or not they were in bed together when Mordred surprised Lancelot in the queen's chamber. What counts is that Mordred told the king he'd found them together and that Guenevere had betrayed Arthur with his favorite knight. Once her reputation had been ruined, Arthur was forced to act. He had to condemn her to death because that was the Law. And Lancelot, as Arthur probably knew full well, had to rescue her."
    "And in so doing the kingdom was torn apart," Jake concluded. "Like I said, Arthur should have kept a tighter rein on Guenevere."
    "Dammit, you can't simplify a great tragedy that way! Lancelot and Guenevere were probably never lovers in the physical sense."
    "They were."
    She gave him a fulminating glance. "You don't know that."
    "I know the male of the species, remember? Or have you forgotten already that I am one? Men don't tend to worship very long from afar, not if they can get inside the queen's bedchamber, believe me. Lancelot and Guenevere were guilty of betraying Arthur. Take my word for it"
    "Take your word for it!" Sabrina echoed, outraged. "Why should I take your word for it? Have you studied Malory? Have you researched the concept of medieval chivalry? What do you know about chivalric love?"
    Jake turned his head to give her a steady, absolutely certain glance. "I know," he said quietly, "that a man can want a woman physically without feeling any particularly noble emotional commitment to her. But I also know that if he does feel a noble emotional commitment, if he needs her, wants to serve her, then he's also going to want to possess her physically. Which is why chivalry never worked all that well in practice."
    Sabrina gave up and slammed her book shut "I can see this is a pointless discussion.
    If you'll excuse me, I'm going to take a hike around this plane and stretch my legs."
    "The rest room," he informed her with a trace of humor, "is behind us about fifteen rows."
    "Thanks," she muttered dryly, scrambling past his long legs.
    Actually, for perhaps the first time in recent memory, Sabrina was running from an intellectual argument and she knew it. But she couldn't help it. The discussion was getting far too dangerous. All she had been able to think about while Jake described a man's responses was the way he had been responding to her on the banquette that morning. It was, quite literally, the very last memory she wished to have revived because along with it came the recollection of her own reaction to his elemental lovemaking. She quickened her pace toward the rest rooms.
    It was as she was deliberately dawdling back down the aisle that she spotted the man with the horn-rimmed glasses and the sandy brown hair sitting about ten rows behind her own seat. She spotted him because he, too, was reading an edition of Malory's Morte d'Arthur . There could be only one reason for such a